On Friday night I attended my first ever London MiniBar meeting . It was great fun, I met lots of interesting folk, and had some very great pro and anti Microsoft conversations after my presentation about Windows Azure. The website sums up the event nicely...

I was one of a number of folks from Microsoft at Carsonified’s Future of Web Design event in London last week. Microsoft were one of the events sponsors, and I have to say we had a really cool stand: The Microsoft Surface device was one of...

I have been asked by the powers that be to update my biography, and supply some new photos. As I always loose this sort of thing, I thought I’d post it here, where I can find it again, and point people to it: Ever since David programmed his first...

The reason for the recent lack of blogs has been my work on our two new Microsoft partner blogs. I will be blogging here still, but check these two blogs out as well . . . The first is our new general purpose ISV blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/ukisvdev...

PDC2008 Professional Developers Conference October 27-30, 2008 - registration is now live. This event really is the premier event to "hear details about Microsoft’s services platform, the future of Windows, mobility and our next generation of developer...

I spent the weekend at Mashed 2008 , a "hack day". Its sponsored by the BBC, Microsoft (through Multimap ), the Guardian (sorry, Gruniad :-)). It's basically a 24 hour hack, with team competing to create the best mashup or web site or piece of code. Around...

Microsoft were one of the sponsors of last weekend’s BarCampLondon5 , so I spend an very enjoyable time talking to a whole host of technical folk about all sorts of things, not all of them technical, but all very interesting :-) If you have never been...

I’m one of the UK DE ISV team involved in delivering a new series of technology briefings entitled “ Fasttrack – The Magic of Software ”, targeted at ISVs , to let them see some of the latest and most exciting software coming out of Microsoft, and...

Whilst reading Steve Krug’s excellent “ Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability ” I came across a wonderfully simple and evocative web site – CSS Zen Garden . I’m a developer and engineer, not a designer, so elegant, well designed...

A couple of weeks ago I did my first ever webcast with a colleague of mine, Dave Glover, and I have to admit, it was great fun to do (although a little scary at times)! We were using Microsoft Office Live Meeting – it’s a very neat bit of...

Happy New Year! It’s the first week of the new year, so an ideal time to start thinking about what 2005 has in store for developers . The number one event, at least for me, has to be the release of the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 (aka ‘Whidbey...

These words (in homage to the Fast Show) are by way of saying that I, for the bulk of Microsoft’s current financial year (July 2004 to June 2005), will be focusing on web services. This is a really cool and interesting area, and it’s great to see, when...

This week I had my first proper article published on MSDN – I’ve reviewed and contributed to other articles, but never sat down and done my own article. So here it is - Understanding and Extending the Site Navigation System in ASP.NET 2.0
The article...

The Visual Studio / SQL Server / BizTalk Server launch is happening in a city near you! And by the looks of it, quite a few of you are going, as the technical tracks at a couple of the venues are already sold out! Impressive! I’m doing some of the integration...

Over the last year I've hosted a number of events to Microsoft partners about Open XML , so it's great to see that, here in the UK, a number of Microsoft Gold and Certified Partners have already taken the opportunity to profile their great work on the...

I've recently picked up my copy of " Inside Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 ", and just started reading it. There are not enough books out there in SharePoint and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), so its great to see a book like...

Yesterday I presented a session at the Office Business Applications (OBA) Architects Council on OBA technologies. My session was all about making people aware of the ways in which they could surface information (typically back from back end line of business...

One evening, in a pub, having a well earned pint with Michael McClary after one of our Microsoft events, I had a brilliant idea - why not write a Microsoft Word add-in that randomly added management "buzzword bingo" phrases into a document or email. It...

I've had a couple of ISVs ask me about a Windows Workflow Foundation page flow session that was delivered at TechEd last year, entitled ‘UI Page Flow by hosting WF in ASP.NET’, which was presented by Israel Hilerio. So, a year later (it was TechEd last...

If you are doing any development work with Office or SharePoint, you might find the Microsoft Office Interactive Developer Map of interest. It's a neat little WPF application, deployed via ClickOnce, that provides lots of useful links in a much more visual...